Two Abbeys II

     A quick trundle down the motorway took us on to Margam Abbey (Cistercian, founded 1147 by Richard, Earl of Gloucester) and a happier scene.  There the abbey's position above the coastal strip helped ensure its survival.  At the Dissolution the conventual buildings were, again, turned into a country house, while the nave passed in parochial use.  And it was to the church we first went. It sits in a small, bosky village above the motorway.  The churchyard is big with plenty of 19th memorials in the Welsh tradition. The exterior of the church dates from the early 19th century, though I suspect some of the features such as the west door are pretty faithful to the original.  The odd pinnacles are evidently not.

     Inside it is big boned; there is a satisfying solidity and strength to the austere Norman architecture. It is very Cistercian in that respect. Atmospheric too with the nave dark and mysterious, the aisles bright with spring sunshine. If there is one, only one, criticism it is the low, heavy ceiling. But that is a minor quibble for the church is filled with good things - in particular the the remarkable collections of funerary monuments in both aisles; Talbots to the North and Mansells to the south with a proper nestling of Jacobean alabaster tombs commemorating four generations of the family.  For me perhaps the most interesting monument is that to Theodore Talbot, based on the tomb of Archbishop Grey in York Minster. It is rather large, possibly over-scaled, but it adds a welcome element of spatial complexity to the Talbot chapel.

     Through the small door in the south aisle and into another world: Margam Park. (I don't think we should really have done that but got back into the car and driven round to the official carpark.) Perhaps an unexpected one at that, for who nowadays associates industrial south Wales with landscaped country parks.  However Margam is not alone, just outside Neath, only a few miles up the M4 from Margam, stands the Gnoll estate.  And like Margam, Gnoll is owned by the local council. Anyway the door opens to where once were the cloisters stood and is now a woodland garden with beautiful specimen trees.  To the left the remains of the east range of the cloisters - a kind of gothic skeleton, all the walls having been removed just leaving the piers and the vaults, and looking like an illustration in an 18th century Gothic novel.  Also surviving is the polygonal chapter house, alas without its vault.  Polygonal chapter houses are a bit of a British speciality; Margam is the only one in Wales, but there are three in Scotland and seventeen in England not counting the Norman circular one at Worcester, where the idea probably originated.  Ahead is the site of the great house built by the Mansells and incorporating parts of the abbatial buildings. 

     However in 1782 the house was demolished and a spectacular orangery constructed (1787) in its place.  It is the longest in Britain, and is the work of Anthony Keck (1726-1797). One part of the original Elizabethan/Jacobean house however was reused as a garden feature.  Oddly it wasn't until the 1830s that a new house, 'Margam Castle', was erected to the designs of Edward Hopper (1776-1856) further up the hill and linked to the church and orangery by a majestic staircase, a thoroughly Baroque concept that wouldn't be out of place in Sixtine Rome.  A nineteenth century equivalent, if you will, to the great cascade at Chatsworth.  The house has the most wilful detailing and is a sort of compendium of early Tudor houses such as Hengrave Hall in Suffolk and Melbury in Dorset.  Eccentric, ostentatious and oddly endearing. The family lived there until 1942.

Two Abbeys I

     After a dismal, wet day on Tuesday the sun shone bright Wednesday.  We went exploring a couple of monastic remains in the vast industrial landscape that sprawls and jostles in the limited space between the sea and the hills east of Swansea.

     Neath first.  Hidden away in an industrial park - an area that has been industrialized for nearly three centuries now.  An unexpected place, then.  John Leland said that it was the fairest abbey in all Wales. (Cistercian, founded 1130 by Sir Richard de Granville) High praise indeed - but better than Tintern?  Who knows now, because the intervening years have been cruel.  Though possibly not a completely false comparison: the plans of both abbey churches are remarkably similar, almost identical, though Neath is a touch smaller and the nave is one bay longer than Tintern, which is the slightly older structure. What does remain of the Abbey church however does suggest something fine. And looking online there are a number of engravings of the abbey remains that show some good architecture. The 16th century Welsh writer Lewis Morganwg wrote of the abbey in heavenly terms.  As often was the case at the Dissolution part of the abbey was converted into a country house, in this case by the Herberts.  That house forms now the most easily understandable, and attractive, part of the ruins. (Unfortunately closed for repairs!) By the 1720/1730s however house and abbey had been turned into a copper smelting works. Then it was iron smelting. The abbey though continued to draw artists and antiquaries.  It was depicted in the Buck brother's monumental print series 'A Collection of Engravings of Castles, Abbeys and Towns in England and Wales' looking very pastoral, the abbey church looking very much as it does today which sort wrecks my theory that the fine stonework (limestone) was robbed out during the industrial revolution for the production of lime. Whatever happened the loss of the detailing has left the abbey remains looking a bit amorphous, sometimes forbidding. When Gilpin visited perhaps more remained than now; he writes obscurely of a 'double tower', but one suspects his visit was fleeting and not too close.  What he actually saw, and thought were towers, are the two pinnacles of stonework left from the west front of the abbey.

   The abbey church again was depicted, from a distance, in that rare and obscure 1835 guide book 'A Guide to the Beauties of Glyn Neath' by William Young. In the 19th century John Borrow describes the surroundings of the abbey as hell on earth, but the abbey, partly abandoned now, was at a one remove from the desolation. By the beginning of twentieth century the remains were buried in up to 17ft of industrial waste, and it wasn't until the 1920s that the ruins were cleared of up to 4,000 tons of rubbish by the Neath Abbey Research Party under the aegis of Glen Arthur Taylor.

   In 1942 John Piper, accompanied by the poet Geoffrey Grigson travelled to Glyn Neath in search of waterfalls (there are quite a number at the top of the valley) guided by Young's book.  Perhaps they came here, but after a quick internet trawl I haven't found anything to suggest they did. The site is now under the care of Cadw.  A slightly strange, haunting place in all.